tech-company, marketing, sales, saas, target-marketSometimes it is hard for business to grab clients just because they are in a different city/country/continent. How a SaaS company can attract other businesses to buy the service at distance? What contact techniques should be used? How to make for distance not being a problem?
How can a SaaS company attract other businesses to buy the service at distance? What contact techniques should be used?
The same way other businesses do it: inbound campaigns, outbound campaigns… Which could be declined here ad nauseam, but there’s actually little point - Googling inbound sales tips and outbound sales tips will yield plenty of good results on top of two sites I linked to.
There’s nothing special about SaaS in this respect. It’s sales, plain and simple. Unless you’re selling cheap SaaS products, arguably, in which case outbound or having a sales team usually isn’t worth it - but the same holds for a cheap consumer product too.
Where SaaS usually makes a difference is that your eye usually is on churn and customer lifetime value, since you’re typically dealing with recurring revenue. But even there you’ll find plenty of examples of non-SaaS businesses that do the exact same thing to sell recurring subscriptions to just about anything.
How to make for distance not being a problem?
It actually is a problem, sorry. If you need support e.g. in the late afternoon PST, and are dealing with a European or India team that is done with their day or still asleep, it can be a real problem.
Software as a Service by definition should cover distance. The questions you ask should not be a concern of SaaS.
The biggest example is Microsoft. They switched the sale of Office from in store selling of the software to a complete online suite of tools used by people around the world.
Your biggest challenge is educating the masses that your software exist.
Look at Open Office, it is a direct competitor to MS Office. They give it away for free compared to MS charging $5/mo access to the base product.
I use Open Office and while it is not as good(in my opinion after being a MS office client for years) as MS Office. It still gets a hefty amount of downloads. But because it is a not for profit venture. It can apply for grant money to keep it going.
Wikipedia is another example of software as a service. They rely totally on grants and donations and have survived since inception January 10, 2001.
So you don’t miss it, distance is not your problem. People knowing who you are is the hurdle you need to cross.
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